Sian Berry, Green Party candidate for mayor of London, talks to us about universal basic income and flat fares on the Tube

When it comes to the Green vote in the London mayoral election,
all the headlines are going to MP Zac Goldsmith, the former
editor of The Ecologist, who is standing for the Conservative
Party.

But greens who can't bring themselves to vote for a Tory have a
different choice: Camden Borough councillor Sian Berry, the
Green Party candidate for mayor.

Business Insider was particularly keen to talk to Berry because
she favours two ideas that would have dramatic economic effects
on the nation's capital: A universal basic income for all and the
replacement of the London Underground's varying Tube fares with a
single flat-rate fare, like they have in New York. (A
basic income policy essentially proposes that welfare and benefit
payments be scrapped in their entirety and replaced with a
single, flat, unconditional payment for everyone.)

She also told us what she thinks of Goldsmith.

Those of you hoping that a Green victory — unlikely at this
point, but you never know! — might usher in a grand basic income
experiment in London,
like the Dutch are doing in Utrecht, prepare for
disappointment. The Chancellor controls the welfare budget
centrally from Westminster, so London can't do it on its own even
if Berry wins. Berry actually favours running a pilot experiment
in a smaller city like Bristol or Newcastle first.

"What you could do is say to the Chancellor ... we want to take
all the welfare payments you're giving to sample of people, give
everyone this unconditional payment, we'll run it for two years.
But it might makes more sense to do it in another city than
London. Somewhere like Bristol or Newcastle, somewhere a bit more
settled and maybe also with a higher proportion of people on
welfare," Berry says.

As for the Tube, prepare for a flat fare of £3 for all journeys,
if Berry wins. Berry wants to phase in her fare reform gradually,
so the flat fare dream would only be fully realised by 2023. "[A]
principle I have is that nobody has a fare rise above what's
currently paid." With the Green Party in control of City Hall
there would be a flat fare for the entire city with a discount if
you avoid zone 1, she says. "Except for people in Outer London,
if you travel and avoid zone 1 you've got a cheaper fare. So at
the end of the process you've got a cheaper fare for avoiding
zone 1 and a flat fare for everyone else."

Sian Berry / Green Party

One of Berry's biggest differences with Goldsmith is her position
on the housing crisis, and how to bring down rent prices. "He
seems to be quite the free-market person. I wrote to him about
rent control this summer. His housing policy so far has been very
much supply. Supply for people to buy. He’s really pushing David
Cameron’s starter homes thing. He wants a lot of them to be built
in London on our public land," Berry says.

Is that bad, building more homes?

"We do need more supply, but that’s not going to solve the
problem. He'll say more supply will bring down house prices and
it will all be fine. That isn't the case, we've got a bigger
problem than that in London. There’s infinite demand in London
for housing, not to be lived in but for people to just buy and
hold as investments. You need to be doing other things as well.
And when I suggested rent controls — he just basically said I
don't want to interfere with market in that way."

So, yes, Berry is in favour of rent control. "We need some way of
keeping the landlords’ profit down a little bit, in terms of the
rents."

"There are various models. Berlin has this new model of rent
control where no one can put up rents beyond 10% of the current
market rate in the area, which is going to keep a bit of a lid on
rent inflation. I think you can probably just say that they can't
be put above CPI [the consumer price index] or something like
that," she says.

For readers who want all the detail, here is a lightly
edited transcript of our full conversation with Berry. We also
talked about Jeremy Corbyn, devolution, and Cameron's plan to
demolish sink estates:

Sian Berry / Green
Party

Universal basic income

BI:One of the reasons we specifically
wanted to speak to you was because the Green Party is the only
party which has a universal basic income promise in its
manifesto.

SB: Well not for London, because it’s not
something we could really bring in London, we don’t have welfare
policies. We are not in charge of the welfare system.
The Dutch cities that are trying it out do have
responsibility for the welfare payment systems in their area.

BI:So is it simply not possible for London
to do a basic income experiment?

SB: Well it could be if we had more devolution
and what we’re going to have in our manifesto is ‘devolution
asks’, and that will be one of them. I wrote to the chancellor
about lots of things being devolved, including business rates.
We’re basically asking for lots of things to be devolved to
London. It makes no sense if you've got lots of control over one
side of policy that can make you savings in one area, that you
can't do that balance yourself. A lot our stuff is about healthy
food and access to good nutrition and also exercise. Now you get
enormous dividends from getting people active and getting doing
active travel and all of that, but it comes back to the health
service which London does not have control over. You can't do
that balance, whereas the Treasury can. The Treasury can take
everything into account.

BI:Do you want control over just the
spending side or the revenue-raising side as well?

SB: All of it, basically. Ideally we’d want to
run the welfare system, the education system, all the things that
are best done at a regional level we’d want to be doing. Like a
German region.

BI:Would that mean there would be a
separate London payroll tax, the way New York City does?

SB: Ooh now that's a tricky one, well, I
actually reckon that income taxes should be done at the national
level.

BI:So how would that work?

SB: We’d be asking for as much autonomy as
possible, basically. Our concept of an economic unit is a
bio-region, which sounds a bit green and ecological, but it's
also all the things that you might do at that level, so food
production for example. I’d love for London to be more autonomous
with its food production, within the boundary city maybe that’s
not quite right, you’d need some hinterland.

BI:Yeah, how is London going to produce its
own food?

Sian Berry / The Green Party

SB: If you counted the surrounding countryside,
that would make an ecoregion.

BI: But isn’t the surrounding region
greenbelt?

SB: You can farm on greenbelt, it’s not like
banned or anything.

BI:But there’s parks out there too.

SB: One of the best people we have out there for
economics is Molly Scott Cato, who’s our MEP for the South West,
she is very good at talking about this kind of thing. I’m not an
economist as you’ve already realised [laughs]. She's absolutely
brilliant about talking about doing things at the regional level,
making sure your economy is circular at that level. Making sure
that the region itself can support itself. The South West has
that kind of potential whereas London has a problem because it
has such it has such a huge population, so much of our food
supply needs to be brought in, we would struggle to be more
autonomous on that, but we can do more work on that.

BI:The nature of trade though is that one
area or one company or one person specialises in one task [not
that everyone does everything for themselves].

SB: You’d want to do that at the right levels.
So things that are easy for everyone to produce we’d want
everyone doing their own.

BI:What are some things we could do that
currently is inefficient or too expensive or retarding
growth?

SB: Things like fresh fruit and vegetables, that
are perishable, which you can grow almost anywhere, you've got
allotments, you can grow on the rooftops, and things like that.
They are heavy to transport. And they cost money to transport. So
things like that, you want to become much more autonomous in.

BI:What is the Green Party’s basic income
promise?

SB: We used to have a very well worked out
policy. The welfare system changed, so that [now] there are
working tax credits. And what we don't have anymore is a very
spelled out policy because working tax credits did do some of
that blunting of the cliff edge that you get. ... A basic
principle of a civilised society is that no one should be
destitute. When you’ve got a complicated system that involves
claiming, you are guaranteeing that some people are going to fall
through the net.

Sian Berry / Green
Party

BI: So why not take the entire welfare budget we have now,
and divide it equally between everyone above 18?

SB: Because people would hardly get anything
then. So you do have to make up for that with some taxes.

BI:
I did the calculations: And it's about £430 a month for all
over 18s.Savings on the admin budget might give you
another £8 on top of the £430. ... My thinking is: if you're the
type of Green who wants people to be able to live off basic
income, you won’t be happy with that, because it's extremely
difficult to live off 400 quid a month.

SB: That's really interesting. That is how you
would make a start because that involves no increase in taxes.
It's a start though. The principle is that it is unconditional,
even if it's low, as long as it's unconditional you have
established the principle. People will understand what it is.
People will get used to having it. Then you can adjust the rates.

BI: Because it's low, and not a complete
income, it would not take away the incentive to work. But it
gives you flexibility — you don't have to take a really crap job.
You can do a part-time job. What are the logistics of why we
can't do a basic income experiment inside a single city the way
the Europeans can?

SB: We aren’t devolved.

BI:Couldn’t a city ask Westminster to
experiment?

SB: You could do that, I'm not proposing this,
it's just a thought experiment! What you could do is say to the
Chancellor ... with the population you have now, take that group
of people, we want to take all the welfare payments you're giving
to sample of people, give everyone this unconditional payment,
we'll run it for two years. But it might makes more sense to do
it in another city than London. Somewhere like Bristol or
Newcastle, somewhere a bit more settled and maybe also with a
higher proportion of people on welfare.

BI:Why would you want that?

SB: Because it's nicer? [Laughs.] But you’d have
to draw a line around the population and have it as a cohort.

BI:Do you have an idea of the costs or
savings?

SB: Again, we haven’t done the actual working
out, since the working tax credits came in.

BI:This has been in your manifesto since
1989!

SB: We had it until 2005, or whenever they
brought in the working tax credits, we had a model that people
had worked out for us. These things cost money — when you've got
a general election next year and you want to work out your
housing program, your transport policies. For London it's not
something I’ve got someone on the job for. I could go and look
for them, I’ve got plenty of volunteers.

BI:Do you have staff?

SB: I’ve got lots of volunteers. I’ve got lots
of people who are experts in policy, who are volunteering who are
helping me develop policy. We haven't commissioned research in
universities. That's what we need, someone to do that.

BI:There have got to be economists out
there who would do this. It hits with the right and the left.
Milton Freidman was an early proposer.

SB: Yes, it’s not even a particularly left-wing
policy. It appeals to my sense of fair play. I know people in my
family who've been in and out of benefits, and it's just
horrible, the way people get treated.

BI:Tell me how you became a Green?

SB: Citizens income is actually one of the
reasons I joined. Because in 2001 it was one of our general
election policies, we were really pushing it and it massively
appealed to me. I’ve been an environmentalist for a long time.

BI:What got you into that, way back
when?

SB: I was at school doing GCSEs, A levels in
late 1980s, early '90s — that is when we had the first wave of
real environmental worry about things like global warming, the
ozone hole, Chernobyl, so to me it just seemed like normal — it
seemed like this was the way the world was going. There were lots
of environmental crises and we were going to solve them

BI:How old are you?

SB: I’m 41.

BI:Ok, you’re younger than me then. So do
you even remember the European election where the Green Party got
15%?

SB: Yes that was in 1989. When I was doing my
GCSEs. Have you ever seen the MORI important issues index? ...
people didn't start saying "the environment" until the 70s — it
was about 5% of people mentioning it as the population’s most
important issue. By '89, 35% of people had the environment as
their top issue and that’s when we did really, really well in the
European elections. That’s when I was at school learning, so I
thought it was normal to be an environmentalist. All these things
were important. No one needed to persuade me. I went to a grammar
school in Cheltenham. Mine was one of the first schools to go
grant-maintained ... quite Thatcherite, I mean it wasn't a
right-wing school but it was quite entrepreneurial.

Zac Goldsmith

BI:Zac Goldsmith has a green reputation,
what are your major differences with him?

SB: He seems to be quite the free-market person.
I wrote to him about rent control this summer. His housing policy
so far has been very much supply. Supply for people to buy. He’s
really pushing David Cameron’s starter homes thing. He wants a
lot of them to be built in London on our public land.

BI:Is that bad?

SB: We do need more supply, but that’s not going
to solve the problem. He'll say more supply will bring down house
prices and it will all be fine. That isn't the case, we've got a
bigger problem than that in London. There’s infinite demand in
London for housing, not to be lived in but for people to just buy
and hold as investments. You need to be doing other things as
well. And when I suggested rent controls — he just basically said
I don't want to interfere with market in that way.

Rent control

BI:Are you in favour of rent control?

SB: Yes we need some way of keeping the
landlords’ profit down a little bit, in terms of the rents.

BI:How would it work?

SB: There are various models. Berlin has this
new model of rent control where: no one can put up rents beyond
10% of the current market rate in the area, which is going to
keep a bit of a lid on rent inflation. I think you can probably
just say that they can't be put above CPI or something like that.

BI:And who would set that rate?

SB: I think the premium would be set
permanently by the mayor on a city by city basis. And then it
would probably vary with inflation.

BI:Are you interested in bringing London
in line with New York’s rent controls?

SB: I am. They are different systems. New
York’s is very long term and very much lower than the market
rate, so there's a sort of two-tier system, which is not what you
want.

BI:So if I’m a property developer and I
know that the city is going to cap the rent I can get out of any
building, I'm now hugely dis-incentivised to build. Because I
know where my profits will top out.

SB: There are two ways of making a profit out
of development, aren't there? There's your long-term rents, and
then there's your appreciating asset that you own. ... we want
people to do house-building as a long-term investment. At the
moment, in viability assessments the standard rate of profit is
now above 20%.

BI:What’s a viability assessment?

SB: When a developer wants to build a set go
homes, if it wants to build less than the required amount of
affordable housing then it needs to justify that, and it will
send in a viability assessment that says we've got to spend this
much on the land, this much on construction, we're going to sell
the private home for this much, in the market, and then the
affordable homes component you wish us to provide will cost this
much, and we'll be able to get this much from a housing
association, and built into that calculation of whether it's
viable or not is the assumption that they will make a profit. And
this is from building something and selling it on, by the end of
the process they're out of there, they have taken away their
profits, at 20%. And you're talking about something like a
three-year process basically. ... That’s a very, very high rate
of profit.

BI:20% after three years, that doesn't
strike me as that high.

SB: Well it could be two years, it could be
less.

BI:If you're taking three years of risk
with your own money, that’s not to be sneezed at.

SB: That’s actually quite a high rate of return.
We'd rather have people building stuff, sitting there holding it,
renting it out to people on a long-term basis, and eventually
maybe selling it on, but so that they take a much longer term
view of it.

BI:If you tell landlords and property
owners that the rents they can get will be capped in some way,
you are going dis-incentives them to provide those units for
rent.

SB: Yeah we’ll dis-incentivise those who are
only after a short-term profit, but I think we will attract in
new models. We need new models. We need people to be able to set
up co-operatives so that they will stay affordable. We want
people to be doing co-housing, we want community land trusts to
get involved as well. All of that involves dampening down on how
much of it is being snapped up by quick profit making.

BI:My other worry about rent control is,
and this is the experience of New York, where I have lived, and
San Francisco, where I haven't lived but I have friends there, is
if you get a rent control flat, you stay there forever. Because
you now have zero incentive to ever leave. It's cheaper than the
market. You know what the rent is going to be. Essentially those
flats are just completely taken off the market. This definitely
restricts the liquidity of the market. And in a major way
restricts the supply of new flats coming on to the market.
Because you get rid of the natural rate of churn. Because people
never want to leave. Liquidity is a real thing. The churn, and
the velocity of the churn, which also reflects in prices.

SB: But they're still living there. Well people
don’t want to leave because these rent control flats are rare.
Part of the reason people don't want to leave is they can't just
find another one.

BI:You're right, traditional rent control
in New York is becoming rarer. There are two more layers on top
of that: rent stabilisation and something else. They’re not quite
as cheap as rent control. In San Francisco there’s a traditional
1950s model — a really significant portion of all the houses are
on rent control. ... If you can get in there you are paying
pennies on the dollar. Housing is more expensive in San Francisco
than anywhere on the planet. And most people will admit it's
because of that.

SB: Here we have the opposite problem. Private
renters here - one-third have had to move in the last year.
Whereas people in council homes, people who own their homes,
you're looking at 4% of people over the year. You've got far too
little security for people looking for private homes to rent. We
need something that helps them to stay for longer. I'd worry
about that problem. Rents are out of control, people are having
to move all the time, it's not just young people, generation
rent, you're talking about families, who are moving with
children, children are having to move school, which is incredibly
destabilising, and so people do want that security.

Sink estates

BI:What do you think of Cameron’s plan to
knock down sink estates?

SB: I don’t like the phrase ‘sink estates’ for
one thing. He’s been to a council estate, we’ve seen the
hug-a-hoodie photo, but he doesn't seem to understand them at
all. I don’t know what ‘sink estates’ he is even talking about.
He’s named Broadwater Farm, but even there you’ve got quite a
strong community defending parts of it. It’s not the worst place
in the world. People have pride in living there.

BI:Some are pretty bad. I’m from Liverpool,
originally, and I’ve seen sink estates, where it is absolutely
clear that if they were razed to the ground it would be an
improvement.

SB: We do know that there were some very, very
bad buildings put up in the 60s and some properly corrupt
developers, so potentially there are some buildings that need to
come down. But I think you've got to do this from the point of
view of starting by talking to the residents and getting their
absolute 100% consent. I would like to have a ballot before any
kind of destruction happens. You are talking about a community
and Cameron just doesn't seem to have any sensitivity that to the
fact that these places are communities and people have pride in
them. At quite a lot of places that get criticised, you go there,
and people show you around and point out how good the design is.
people go "oh it's ugly" but it's not actually. Once you're
inside, the spaces work. People have got planters outside their
homes, people have got views. ... Whittington Estate in my ward,
these are fantastically designed modernist estates. Google it.
People love living there. It's full of architects. ... The idea
that you would just knock something down and start again? You're
clearing out an existing community, it's a 10-year process, it's
incredibly disruptive to the whole area, it's far better to
refurbish these places. And also from a Green perspective, when
you have a construction process that involves knocking down and
building again, it's unbelievably noisy, the dust, why would you
do that?

BI:Because of the density issue. One of the
problems London clearly has is that it is much, much less dense
than Paris or New York. There are fewer people per square mile
living here. And one of the great things about New York is that
those very tall apartment buildings are incredibly energy
efficient because one apartment insulates the next, unlike a
house. Whereas in London you have the opposite of that.
So if you want better density and better efficiency, then you are
going to have to knock down some of these completely crap
buildings.

SB: There are other options. I do agree with
you. We need more density in lots of places and a tower block in
the middle of an enormous field is not a great use of space. It
can be very bleak. And you don't have the density then that you
need to support local shopping centres and pubs and things like
that, which makes it even worse. There is a really good report by
Darren Johnson who's our Assembly Member, about ways of doing the
density without destruction. In-fill developments, and putting
things on top of existing estates. Doing refurbishment and energy
efficiency on the existing floors, and then adding extra floor on
top. ... A good chunk of what we need could be done that way. You
could do that from a community perspective. You can say to the
community, here's some ideas, please can you have a look, see
what you think about them. What we would do is create a community
homes unit in city hall — there are architects, there are
surveyors, there are people who can do the business cases
available — and they can put together their own plans. And when
you do that, quite often they come up with more new homes than if
the architects just do it. Because they know the spaces, they
that an in-fill space like a car park or a corner, they know it's
unused, so they'll nominate that space down to have more homes
in. The architect might not do that because it looks like a bit
of open space that the community wanted to use. And if you get
communities to nominate their own designs you then don't have —
which is a really bad thing that lots of councils have — these
three-year planning battles. And endless conflict with the
community as well, which wears everybody down

Flat fares for the Tube

BI:Let’s talk about the Tube. You proposed
a flat-fare scheme.

SB: I think it's very unfair that people in
outer London pay more to get to work than people in inner London.
I think people have very little choice about where they work. And
less choice than they used to about where they live. And people
who end up in outer London because that's the only place they can
afford to rent, they have a lot of their income and savings taken
away by travel costs. It kind of doesn't make sense. We’ve had
the flat fare on the bus since 2003 or 2004. It makes more sense
to work towards a flat fare for London. It's what New York has.
You probably got used to it!

BI:I find graduated fares outrageous. I
think it exacerbates the property problem. In New York, if you
want to save some money, you can move out because your transport
costs will be the same. But here if you choose to move out you
are punished.

SB: Yes. Not only do you spend longer on the
Tube but you have to pay for the privilege. It’s a response to
the housing crisis as well, the fact that people are being forced
to move out. ... I’ve constructed a model with the fare rates and
... their assumptions about fare inflation, their assumptions
about passenger growth, and created a model about how much they
will be getting each year til 2023. And then I played around with
it and had a go to see if flattening was possible and it turns
out it is.

BI:So what is the flat fare?

SB: You start by merging zones 5 and 6, and
zones 3 and 4, and then the new zone in zone 5 you give a
discount as well. This costs about £115 million in the first
year, which is a reasonable amount to be saving, and then you let
the ones in the centre go up by inflation, + 1% which is the
current plan, and then you freeze the ones on the outside. ...
You do it gradually. First of all you just make it four zones
instead of six, then you keep bringing them together. So by 2023,
all the travel cards and all the daily caps are the same.

BI:Why can't you just add up all the fares
and divide it by the total number of rides?

SB: If you did it in a revenue neutral way — the
flat fare is £3 and that’s a fare rise for a lot of people and
isn't actually a fair thing to do.

BI:It's a fare rise in zone 1. But for the
people in zone 6 it's a huge discount! Why not be brave
about it? Why not just say screw the people in zone 1, they are
the richest people! They can pay £3!

SB: There are many council estates in zone 1
and 2. Another principle I have is that nobody has a fare rise
above what's currently paid. ... Except for people in Outer
London, if you travel and avoid zone 1 you've got a cheaper fare.
So at the end of the process you've got a cheaper fare for
avoiding zone 1 and a flat fare for everyone else.

BI:What about pedestrianisation. Should we
block off Oxford Street to traffic?

SB: I think we should block off Oxford Street to
traffic. There are quite a few streets in the West End that would
benefit from that and quite a few town centres outside central
London that could benefit from that. ... We need something to
replace the congestion charge. ... To really reduce traffic we
need a road pricing scheme charging you according to what road
you're on, what time of day it is. ... That would raise money and
cut traffic, and that enables you to take away more road space.

Uber and taxis

BI:That’s sounds complicated. Let’s talk
about Uber. For or against?

SB: Suspicious of.

BI:Wrong answer! Why?

SB: There are certain things about it that are
good.

BI:Do you use Uber?

SB:No, I have never used Uber. I use public
transport. I live in zone 2.

BI:Uber is public transport!

SB: No it isn't! My suspicions about Uber are
that it's going to increase traffic. It's actually encouraging
people off public transport onto Uber and we don't want that.
They are not filling in the gaps between public transport which
are mainly in Outer London. I think to some extent they might be
attracting traffic into central London and that's really what we
don't want, I am worrying about. I would put some sort of
controls on the number of drivers registered. I can see that it
has a role, cabbies have a role as well, filling the gaps where
there is no public transport.

BI: All the cabbies are all in zone 1 as
well!

SB: So are the Ubers! ... In practice what I
think it's doing is encouraging more trips by car.

Jeremy Corbyn

BI: Jeremy Corbyn, what do you think?

SB: I am in favour of Jeremy Corbyn! He is part
of a series of surges of people into what is basically
progressive politics. ... In the last few years we've seen
massive surges of people into the Scottish National Party, into
the Green Party and then into the Labour Party.

BI: The SNP is a party of the left?

SB: It isn't really but there was a progressive
agenda behind the "yes" campaign ... there was a lot of left-wing
people, basically progressive people, brought into that campaign.
People say aren't there lots of people leaving the Greens for
Labour? And actually, it's just more people coming in for the
same reasons into a different party.

BI: Labour was supposed to have vetted these
things specifically to not allow the Green people in.

SB: I know. Some people joined us a year ago in
the surge because we inspired them a bit and then Jeremy Corbyn
inspired them a bit. They're not party loyal people. They're just
interested in getting involved in activism for the first time
probably, and that's great. I think it's all good. We've got a
real growth of people wanting to change the world and it's all
great.